Joint Effort by Stanford and Harvard to Focus on Alleviating American Poverty

Stanford University and Harvard University have formed the Collaboration for Poverty Research, a joint effort to focus attention and win public support for new measures to solve the persisting problem of poverty in America. The collaboration will support four specific projects:

• A national task force to investigate American poverty and social inequality.

• A social policy laboratory that promotes science-based evaluations and policy innovations that expand economic opportunity and social mobility.

• A graduate and undergraduate intern program where students will work with the national task force or the social policy laboratory.

• A series of executive roundtable forums to foster an exchange of ideas between researchers and policymakers.

The new effort will link Stanford’s Center for the Study of Poverty and the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The new program is funded by a $3.9 million grant from the Elfenworks Foundation.